Sample Schedule

Schedules and activities at the Carle Auditory Oral School are broken out between Preschool/Pre-K and Primary grades. A typical day in both the Preschool/Pre-K and Primary grades is outlined below.

Preschool/Pre-K

Circle Time/Calendar
Participation in this daily routine helps children to develop counting and time concepts, discuss past and future events and incorporate music into their daily lives. Children develop the ability to use targeted language structures easily with this type of daily practice, and when their use becomes automatic, children are better able to generalize communication skills to other environments.

Journals
Journals serve as a communication tool between home and school, and allow even the youngest child to share information between these two important parts of their world. Teachers help each individual child to select something from the school day to draw/ write about in their journal. The journals go home in the evening and provide a forum for kids to share what they learned at school that day. Additionally, families are asked to create a journal entry each evening, providing a prompt for kids to share stories from home with their peers. The children at Carle Auditory Oral School love sharing journals with peers and are often found flipping through previous pages to reminisce about their experiences.

Recess/Movement/Gross Motor
Children learn through play – dramatic play which ignites children’s imaginations, as well as large motor play, which helps their bodies to develop. Carle Auditory Oral School provides daily opportunities for children engage in unstructured learning and play during recess. Carle Auditory Oral School shares a large outdoor play area with The Caring Place Child Care Center. Tricycles, swings, climbers and slides, in addition to opportunities for running and ball play are available to our students. Indoors, door mounted swings, scooters, jump ropes, a mini-trampoline and hula hoops ensure that children at Carle Auditory Oral School have opportunities to develop large motor skills even when weather precludes outdoor play.

Snack
Snack provides a wonderful opportunity to practice manners, self-help and social communication skills in the small group learning environment at Carle Auditory Oral School. Often discussions begun during snack will spark future learning opportunities in the classroom. Additionally, snack time is sometimes used as an additional opportunity to read aloud to the children.

Daily Read-Alouds
All children benefit from this language and literacy enriching experience. Stories come to life with props and dramatic voices to support children in developing a life-long love of reading. The way Carle Auditory Oral School teachers share stories with children also provides each child with opportunities to answer questions, make predictions, assume the role of a character in a story or take a turn at retelling stories. Research shows that literacy rich experiences, such as read-alouds, correlate positively to future academic success. Often, classroom teachers alter story book text to provide additional practice with targeted language forms for children with hearing loss. By listening to stories over time, children are bombarded with examples of targeted language structures and incorporate those structures when they retell and act out the stories.

Language Experiences
Children learn best when two components are present: application to real life interactions and opportunities to interact directly with learning materials. Language experiences provide both of these components. Children in Carle Auditory Oral School classes engage in language experiences to introduce or culminate a unit of study. Examples of experiences include field trips, cooking activities, construction projects, and performances. Children frequently create experience books to document their experiences, and develop language and literacy skills at the same time.

Lunch
Hot lunch is available through Carle Foundation Hospital/The Caring Place Child Care Center, and costs are included in the tuition fees. Additionally, families can opt to send cold lunches with their child. This thirty minute break in the school day provides children with another opportunity to practice manners, self-help skills and social communication as they catch up with their friends from other classes.

Nap
Parents of preschool age children can request that their child participate in a daily nap time. Parents are asked to provide a plastic coated foam mat, pillow, blanket and sleeping toy for their napper. Exact times and duration of nap time vary from year to year based on our student's needs.

Pre-Academics
Reading, math, science and health concepts begin to develop long before kindergarten. Interactions and learning activities at Carle Auditory Oral School provide children with developmentally appropriate learning experiences during theme related activities. Children learn phonological awareness skills, experiment with quantity concepts, explore the relationships between objects in their worlds and use print meaningfully throughout each day. These experiences lay the foundation for academic skill development in later years.

Centers
Carle Auditory Oral School embarks on learning adventures during their theme-based units of study and the Discovery Center brings it all to life. The four early childhood classes (3 and 4 year olds) share a unit of study and discovery center classroom. In this larger center room, children have the opportunity to play the theme in our dramatic play, block, computer, writing, art, motor and manipulatives centers.

Sensory Breaks
Young children function better when they have a variety of experiences throughout the day. They benefit from opportunities to get their wiggles out through dance, exercise and play, in addition to opportunities attend to stories and engage in fine motor activities. Sensory breaks provide these opportunities to the children enrolled in Carle Auditory Oral School. In the halls and classrooms of Carle Auditory Oral School, it is not uncommon to see groups of children transitioning from one activity to the next in a crab walk, or taking a break from an art activity to do jumping jacks. Providing these sensory breaks allows children to have success and feel good about their developing academic and social skills.

Music
CDs, musical instruments, sing-a-longs, and home made music makers are incorporated throughout the day to assist children with transitions, and skill acquisition in addition to developing an ear and appreciation for a variety of music forms.

Clean-Up and Dismissal
Children learn valuable organization skills and develop a sense of pride in their accomplishments when they participate in getting their classrooms ready for learning the following day. Daily jobs build responsibility and foster development of independent skills for each student. Dismissal provides an opportunity for parents and teachers to interact informally at the end of each school day and helps to maintain the home school collaboration so important to each child’s success.

Daily Individual Therapy
The type and amount of therapy that each child receives is based on their individual communication profile. Most children enrolled in Carle Auditory Oral School participate in 60 minutes per day of one-on-one therapy with a certified speech language pathologist or aural rehabilitation audiologist. The unit of study is incorporated into the sessions to assist with generalization of skills across multiple environments.

Most children enrolled in Carle Auditory Oral School also participate in 15 minute drill sessions each day. Drills are focused on the area that is most significantly negatively impacting a child’s communication. For some children this area is speech, for others it is auditory memory or vocabulary. During the drill, children have repeated successful practice with the target to help develop automaticity and accelerate progress. Drills are typically scheduled opposite the full therapy session. That is, a child who has therapy in the morning will have a drill in the afternoon to provide focused practice throughout the school day.

Additionally, since we know that children with hearing loss tend to have gaps in their knowledge and communication abilities, Carle Auditory Oral School is dedicated to preventing future holes from developing. To support this goal, the school follows a simultaneous pull out model for therapy and drills. Essentially, simultaneous pull out means that all children with hearing loss in a given class participate in therapy at the same time. Teaching stops, children with hearing loss go to therapy, children with normal hearing go to enrichment. After 60 minutes, everyone returns to class and learning resumes. This ensures that all children are present for essential learning activities. Additionally, it helps with the formation of a solid class culture, as all children engage in learning activities together.

Daily speech sessions are documented so that families can support communication skill development in a meaningful way. Parents and staff partner in addressing the majority of speech, language and listening targets. In addition to the daily sheets, therapists, teachers and parents provide weekly updates on all targets to help the team stay on the same page.

Enrichment
Children with normal hearing who are enrolled at Carle Auditory Oral School participate in 60 minutes per day of enrichment with our assistant teachers. For those children with hearing loss who do not participate in daily individual therapy, enrichment is available to augment the learning experience. During this enrichment block, children with hearing loss go to therapy and work on their areas of greatest need. The enrichment block provides opportunities to address need areas specific to our children with normal hearing as well as expand their experiences. For many children with normal hearing, Carle Auditory Oral School is their first exposure to a structured learning environment. As such, they may need additional support to develop fine motor, academic, or social skills. Specific practice with needed skills can be provided during enrichment. Enrichment sessions have also provided opportunities for additional read-alouds, exploration of technology including laptops and SmartBoards, cooking activities, exposure to foreign languages, yoga, and a variety of art media. The enrichment program continues to develop as the program grows and changes.

primary

Morning Routine/Calendar
Participation in this daily routine helps children to expand math concepts including skip counting, money skills and time, discuss past and future events and experience real life reading and writing opportunities. Phonological awareness activities to foster development of rhyming, sound letter association, breaking words into syllables/individual sounds and manipulating words given an auditory model, also contribute positively to literacy skill advancement. Children develop the ability to use targeted language structures easily with this type of daily practice, and when their use becomes automatic, children are better able to generalize communication skills to other environments.

Journals
At this level, journals are used to foster development of written communication skills. Teachers assign a daily writing assignment which incorporates targeted vocabulary, concepts, and as appropriate, word wall/spelling words. Depending upon the child’s individual level, the journal assignment may be comprised of pictures, single printed words, basic sentences or several paragraphs.

Recess/Movement/Gross Motor
Children learn and relax through play – both large motor play, which helps their bodies to develop as well as social and imaginative play, which fosters social relationship development. Carle Auditory Oral School
provides daily opportunities for children to engage in unstructured learning and play during recess. Carle Auditory Oral School shares a large outdoor play area with The Caring Place Child Care Center. Tricycles, swings, climbers and slides, in addition to opportunities for running and ball play are available to our students. Indoors, door mounted swings, scooters, jump ropes, a mini-trampoline and hula hoops ensure that children at Carle Auditory Oral School have opportunities to develop large motor skills even when weather precludes outdoor play.

Snack
Snack provides a wonderful opportunity to practice manners, self-help and social communication skills in the small group learning environment at Carle Auditory Oral School. Often discussions begun during snack will spark future learning opportunities in the classroom. Additionally, snack time is sometimes used as an additional opportunity to read aloud to the children.

Daily Read-Alouds
All children benefit from this language and literacy enriching experience. Stories can be brought to life with props and dramatic voices to support children in developing a life-long love of reading. The way Carle Auditory Oral School teachers share stories with children also provides each child with opportunities to answer questions, make predictions, assume the role of a character in a story or take a turn at retelling stories. Research shows that literacy rich experiences, such as read-alouds, correlate positively to future academic success. Often, classroom teachers alter story book text to provide additional practice with targeted language forms for children with hearing loss. By listening to stories over time, children are bombarded with examples of targeted language structures and incorporate those structures when they retell and act out the stories.

Language Experiences
Children learn best when two components are present: application to real life interactions and opportunities to interact directly with learning materials. Language experiences provide both of these components. Children in Carle Auditory Oral School classes engage in language experiences to introduce or culminate a unit of study. Examples of experiences include field trips, cooking activities, construction projects, and performances. Children frequently create experience books to document their experiences, and develop language and literacy skills at the same time.

Lunch
Hot lunch is available through Carle Foundation Hospital/The Caring Place Child Care Center, and costs are included in the tuition fees. Additionally, families can opt to send cold lunches with their child. This thirty minute break in the school day provides children with another opportunity to practice manners, self-help skills and social communication as they catch up with their friends from other classes.

Centers
Kindergarten students participate in centers on a daily basis at Carle Auditory Oral School. Centers includes a rotation of art, fine motor, computers and hands-on experiences relating to the unit of study.

Sensory Breaks
Young children function better when they have a variety of experiences throughout the day. They benefit from opportunities to get their wiggles out through dance, exercise and play, in addition to opportunities attend to stories and engage in fine motor activities. Sensory breaks provide these opportunities to the children enrolled in Carle Auditory Oral School. In the halls and classrooms of Carle Auditory Oral School, it is not uncommon to see groups of children transitioning from one activity to the next in a crab walk, or taking a break from an art activity to do jumping jacks. Providing these sensory breaks allows children to have success and feel good about their developing academic and social skills.

Clean Up and Dismissal
Children learn valuable organization skills and develop a sense of pride in their accomplishments when they participate in getting their classrooms ready for learning the following day. Daily jobs build responsibility and foster development of independent skills for each student. Dismissal provides an opportunity for parents and teachers to interact informally at the end of each school day and helps to maintain the home school collaboration so important to each child’s success.

Daily Individual Therapy
The type and amount of therapy that each child receives is based on their individual communication profile. Most children enrolled in Carle Auditory Oral School participate in 60 minutes per day of one-on-one therapy with a certified speech language pathologist or aural rehabilitation audiologist. The unit of study is incorporated into the sessions to assist with generalization of skills across multiple environments.

Most children enrolled in Carle Auditory Oral School also participate in 15 minute drill sessions each day. Drills are focused on the area that is most significantly negatively impacting a child’s communication. For some children this area is speech, for others it is auditory memory or vocabulary. During the drill, children have repeated successful practice with the target to help develop automaticity and accelerate progress. Drills are typically scheduled opposite the full therapy session. That is, a child who has therapy in the morning will have a drill in the afternoon to provide focused practice throughout the school day.

Additionally, since we know that children with hearing loss tend to have gaps in their knowledge and communication abilities, Carle Auditory Oral School is dedicated to preventing future holes from developing. To support this goal, the school follows a simultaneous pull out model for therapy and drills. Essentially, simultaneous pull out means that all children with hearing loss in a given class participate in therapy at the same time. Teaching stops, children with hearing loss go to therapy, children with normal hearing go to enrichment. After 60 minutes, everyone returns to class and learning resumes. This ensures that all children are present for essential learning activities. Additionally, it helps with the formation of a solid class culture, as all children engage in learning activities together.

When children reach first grade the amount of academic information that must be covered in a day increases dramatically. Because of this therapy for first and second graders occurs outside of the school day. Sessions are sometimes scheduled from 8 a.m. – 9 a.m., and other times are scheduled after school from 3:25 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.

Daily speech sessions are documented so that families can support communication skill development in a meaningful way. Parents and staff partner in addressing the majority of speech, language and listening targets. In addition to the daily sheets, therapists, teachers and parents provide weekly updates on all targets to help the team stay on the same page.

Enrichment
Children with normal hearing who are enrolled at Carle Auditory Oral School participate in 60 minutes per day of enrichment with our assistant teachers. During this enrichment block, children with hearing loss go to therapy and work on their areas of greatest need. The enrichment block provides opportunities to address need areas specific to our children with normal hearing as well as expand their experiences. For many children with normal hearing, Carle Auditory Oral School is their first exposure to a structured learning environment. As such, they may need additional support to develop fine motor, academic, or social skills. Specific practice with needed skills can be provided during enrichment. Enrichment sessions have also provided opportunities for additional read-alouds, exploration of technology including laptops and SmartBoards, cooking activities, exposure to foreign languages, yoga, and a variety of art media. The enrichment program continues to develop as the program grows and changes. For those children with hearing loss who do not participate in daily individual therapy, enrichment is available to augment the learning experience. Because of the academic content and therapy schedule, first and second graders do not have enrichment sessions.

Specials
Children in kindergarten, first and second grade participate in specials each week. Children enjoy two 30-minute sessions of Physical Education, two 30- minute sessions of Music and one 45-minute session of art each week. Specials are led by Carle Auditory Oral School staff members with support from graduate and doctoral students in the art, music and physical education teacher preparation programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As with other parts of the school day, specials provide additional opportunities for children to hear and practice targeted language structures across environments. Holding children accountable for their targets across the school day helps children to internalize communication skills more readily and increases their rate of progress.

Academics
Carle Auditory Oral School staff combine commercial curricula with teacher made activities and learning opportunities to ensure that each individual child receives the support and learning experiences they need to expand their skills. The small group, individualized instruction helps to prepare students for a successful transition into their neighborhood schools. Examples of curricula used at CAOS include: Everyday Mathematics, Timelinks, Foss Science Kits, Write Group Leveled Readers, McGraw- Hill Health and Wellness texts.